"Court Is In Session" Jeremiah 2:11-13 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning though, Jeremiah 2, let me read our two verses, only two verses this morning, verses 12 and 13.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares Yahweh.

For my people have committed two evils, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

This morning our passage takes us inside of a courtroom.

Some of the trappings of this courtroom are the same.

There's a jury seated in the jury box, there's a prosecutor, and there is a defendant.

But the identity of these characters is what makes this courtroom scene unique.

The normal judge, the one who is the judge of the universe, the one who reigns over all other judges, the one who is accustomed to rendering verdicts for himself, has taken off his black robe and left the judge's station.

And in this courtroom drama that we have this morning, he is taking up the mantle of a prosecutor.

He is the one bringing the charges.

The jury, the ones hearing the case, the ones who have rendered the verdict, is none other than the very stars of heaven.

And if this sounds like a made-for-TV drama, there's one final twist.

The defendant is you.

It is you that is on trial this morning.

The prosecutor bringing charges against you is God himself.

That's the scene we find here in this courtroom drama in Jeremiah chapter 2.

Jeremiah 2 · chapter mention

To understand the background of this, understand that a generation before Jeremiah, God, through the prophet Isaiah, had told the Israelites they were going to go into captivity by Babylon.

Babylon would conquer them and drag them, screaming and kicking into exile.

The Jews of Isaiah's lifetime did not believe that message.

After all, Israel was relatively prosperous and Babylon was unheard of.

It was a small province inside of a larger empire of Syria.

It would be the equivalent of me today, telling you that one day the nation of Enguilla will rise up and conquer the U.S.

And some of you would laugh, thinking, is that even a real nation?

Yes, it is.

You'd have to find it on a map.

It's in the Caribbean Ocean, but they're coming for us.

You would dismiss my warning.

Because you have to look at the map to find them.

They're not a real threat.

That's what the Jews did with Isaiah's warning.

Baba who?

And they moved on with their life.

Well, now a generation later, the Babylonians have overthrown the Assyrian Empire.

The Babylonians have become the main player on the international stage, and they are knocking on Jerusalem's door.

They will conquer Jerusalem.

They will take her into exile.

And the Jews still refuse to believe the message.

God gives them the prophet Jeremiah.

All of the other prophets in Israel's history had promised Israel deliverance, had prophesied, you know, the main sin of Israel's past was trusting other nations instead of God.

And so the other prophets would tell the Israelites, trust God and he'll defend you.

Not Jeremiah.

Jeremiah's message is the opposite.

Jeremiah's message is trust God and surrender.

God has given his verdict.

The Babylonians are taking you away.

If you have faith, pack your bags.

That's Jeremiah's message, which makes him the weeping prophet.

What a sad ministry.

He's the pastor who never gets to preach the gospel.

Only judgment, he tells them, over and over and over again.

Israel of Jeremiah's lifetime, as I mentioned, very different.

They're oppressed and poor, they're desperate and destitute.

Food and water are scarce, and yet still they refuse to listen to Jeremiah.

Now, in those days, if someone made a covenant with you and then they broke their covenant, you would bring them before the elders at the city gates.

In our American culture, if you and I have a contract between each other and you break the contract, I can see you in small claims court.

In the Israelite world, you would take the person before the elders at the city gate, and they had a very prescribed procedure for this.

You would summon the person, he would have to show up there.

You would then start interrogating him in front of the elders.

You would say, We did this, and what were you thinking when you did that?

And it would be a back and forth.

You would examine him and cross-examine him, and all that's taking place in front of the elders.

After all of that, you then turn to the elders and you tell them what it is exactly you want them to do.

And then, very succinctly, this part is key, very succinctly, you then say, these are the charges I'm bringing against that person.

Very different than the American court system.

Everything in that is opposite in the U.S.

court system.

In the U.S.

court system, it starts with the charges, then it goes to an opening statement, then it goes to examination, cross-examination, then a closing statement.

This Hebrew system is reversed.

But like the American system, there's so many idioms that go along with this.

If you were to hear an American say, I'll rise, you know you're in a courtroom.

Will the gentleman please approach the bar?

You know you're in a courtroom, or a bar.

If you hear somebody say, I rest my case, ladies and gentlemen, the jury, all courtroom phrases.

The Hebrew world has all of those identical phrases, and they're all used in this chapter.

So there's no doubt that Jeremiah 2 is painting the scene of this cosmic courtroom.

But as I mentioned, what is unusual about it is God is the prosecutor.

And I love this twist to the old story because we normally conceive God as the judge, us as the defendant, Jesus as the defense attorney, and maybe the devil is the prosecutor kind of thing.

That's our normal image, which is a fine image.

It's used that way in Revelation 12.

1 John describes Jesus as our advocate.

So that makes sense.

It's a fine image.

But what that image misses, it's not complete.

What that image misses is it has a tendency to downplay or undermine the severity of sin in our life.

If you only conceive of God as the judge and Jesus as the defense attorney, you lose what is so powerfully evil about sin.

We often think that hell is an overreaction to sin.

If you think of sin as bad choices or you know, wrong thinking or mistakes or peccadillos kind of thing, it's very easy to conceive of hell as a divine overreaction.

But this image here, this image of God as the prosecuting attorney, it drives home to you the severity of sin.

It adjusts your thinking by giving you a different perspective on this courtroom scene.

It adjusts your thinking and it shows you exactly why sin is so evil.

It introduces you to sin from God's perspective.

The trial really picks up in chapter 2, verse 4, when the Lord is contending with Jacob, and this phrase here, the word of Yahweh, he's contending with Jacob, the ones that have wronged him.

He says in verse 5, What wrong did your fathers find in me?

So God's defending himself as he's laying these accusations.

Then he recounts all he did for them.

He says in verse 6, I'm the one who led you out of Egypt.

I led you through droughts and darkness.

I, verse 7, brought you into plentiful lands.

And yet, and here's the start of the cross-examination, you defiled my land, he says.

Verse 8, the priest did not say, Where is Yahweh?

Those who handled the law, they didn't know me.

The shepherds transgressed against me, the prophets prophesied by Baal.

They went after things that don't profit.

So God is saying, You people, Israel, you have neglected me.

You rejected me, he tells the jury.

Therefore, verse 9, I contend with you.

Again, this is legal language.

Any G reading this would find themselves right in their mind in the courtroom.

I contend with you, God says.

It's your fault, Yahweh declares.

With your children's children I will contend.

He says, look around the world, from the coast of Cyprus, Kedar, examine with care.

See if this kind of thing has ever happened, God says.

Verse 11, has a nation changed its gods?

Even though they are no gods.

Do you catch what Yahweh is doing here?

He says, look around the whole world.

Have you ever found a nation that has changed its gods?

Ever.

Nations don't change their gods.

And then God points out the real irony in this, even though they're not even real gods.

You think of the Philistines who worshiped Dagon, the fish god.

And remember, they put the Ark of the Covenant in with the fish god and it fell down in a real humpty dumpty problem.

Remember, broke into all these pieces.

The Philistines didn't abandon Dagon.

No, they duct taped him together and propped him back up.

Samson comes and pulls down their temple.

They still worship their idols.

You think today?

You think of even how harmful so many religions are to the people that practice them.

You think of India just ravaged by the evils of Hinduism.

Yet they're not going to reject their religion.

It's their religion.

They see it as their identity, even though it just plunges that nation into so much evil.

You think of so many of the Middle East nations that are trapped in the darkness that Islam provides for them.

And yeah, they're not going to reject their religion.

Nations don't do that.

In world history, there's been one nation that's rejected its God.

And that's Israel.

Rejected him, threw him away.

That's God's point in verse 11.

And he happens to be a real God.

Now verse 12.

This is where the tone of the Hebrew changes, and it is now the prosecutor who is talking directly to the jury, directly to the elders.

And he's saying, This is what I want you to do.

This is the part of the trial where the prosecutor tells the elders, this is the remedy, this is the response, this should be your result, this should be the verdict you render because of what you heard.

Here it is, verse 12 says.

And here's the first identity of the jury.

Who did God seat as his jury?

The heavens.

It's the Hebrew for stars.

There are the stars in the sky, and that's who God has pegged as the jury.

I'm summoning you, stars, because who is God gonna get to listen?

You know, there's no elders at the city gate here.

Who has seen all of this?

Who are the neutral witnesses God can call?

And by doing this courtroom illustration here, God is making you look at your sin from the perspective of a detached bystander.

Not from your own perspective, not from even another human perspective, because you're sinning against God.

So who is a bystander who can look at God and look at you and see your sin and just watch it and observe it and give a verdict?

God calls the stars themselves.

Sit down here.

Stars, look at this sin.

Look at what they've done.

Look at all the nations.

Psalm 19 says, everything that happens on earth happens under the purview of the stars.

They see all things.

And God here leverages that and says, stars, look at this.

And here's what you should do.

First thing God wants the stars, the jury, to do here is to be appalled.

That word literally means disgusted.

Just be revolted by what you see.

In other words, what you have seen here is so perverse it should make you nauseous.

It should make you feel sick.

You should just be appalled at the grotesque nature of this kind of sin.

The one response you should have should be that of disgust.

If you've ever been in a courtroom and the charges are red, and the people in the jury have a disgusted look on their face.

They look at the defendant with a look of disgust.

You know that guy's in trouble.

That's the scene here.

The stars look at people on earth who sin and they are disgusted.

Be shocked, the next word says.

Be shocked.

It's a Hebrew idiom.

It means to have your hair stand up on end.

And we kind of use that in English too.

If you, you know, grab something from the outlet, you get shocked, your hair stands up.

Well, the Israelites didn't have electricity.

In Hebrew, this word is usually used with the animals.

Like if a cat sees something frightening, his hair stands up.

Or if a fox sees somebody after it, its tail poofs out.

That's this word.

And here God is telling the stars, you should be shocked at this stars.

If the stars had hair, it would be standing on end over how ridiculous the sin of mankind is.

It should be frightening.

God is asking for an extreme emotional response to an extremely perverse crime.

And the third thing God wants from this jury is to be utterly desolate.

It's a kind of a passive verb here.

It means to just be unraveled.

Unraveled.

It's like a ball of yarn that misses its core.

It just unwinds and just collapses right there.

It was a tight ball of yarn yesterday, now it's just a pile of string everywhere today.

They have a word for that.

That's this word.

And God is telling the stars, I want you to be undone over this.

The very consistency of your nature, that gravity is holding the stars together.

God says the sin they see should be so shocking that they just unravel and just lay out.

They fall in on the weight of their own shock and disgust.

All the stars should become black holes because of what they see.

That's the image.

But that's the command in verse 12.

I mean, it makes it sound like the sins that God is talking about are the worst sins ever made, ever done in the whole world.

Well, the final part of the trial, this is where the prosecutor succinctly says, this is what I'm charging the person with.

This is what they've actually done.

Here's the crime.

And you get that in verse 12, verse 13.

My people have committed two evils, God says.

Two evils.

What are they that's so bad?

The first, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.

By refusing to submit themselves to the teaching of God's word and to the ministry of the righteous prophets, they have forsaken God.

Forsaken just means to ignore, neglect, to stand up.

You're supposed to meet somebody and you just don't show.

That's forsaken.

You forget about them.

You care so little about the person, you've forgotten about him.

That's what the word forsaken means.

And that's what the Israelites had done to God.

They had forsaken him.

They went away.

They went to different gods, different idols that were more appealing to them than the real God.

That's their crime.

Certainly, the Israelites have committed other sins.

Certainly they had committed idolatry.

Certainly they had committed adultery.

Certainly they had murdered.

Jeremiah confronts many of these sins.

In fact, even in chapter 2, he confronts many of these sins.

The sins of greed and of extortion are all confronted in chapter 2.

Elsewhere in Jeremiah, he confronts a whole array of sins from murder to depravity.

He confronts slavery.

He says later on in Jeremiah that you put nets on the ground and you trap people like a fowl or like they're birds, and then you make them build big houses for you as you get rich.

And God says, I will judge you for that sin.

So Jeremiah condemns slavery later on.

But right here, he doesn't bring out the charges of slavery or of murder or of adultery or of oppressing the poor.

Illicit gain, he doesn't bring out any of those.

Right now, he just brings out one thing.

You forsook God.

All the other sins, they're just part of the cover-up.

The real crime is that you rejected God.

Do you understand that every sin is that sin?

The attitude behind every single sin.

And this is why it's not just Israel that's on trial, it is you.

If you have sinned before, this is you in the dock.

This is you in the witness stand.

It's you that's been drugged at the city gate.

Sin is against God.

Every single sin is a result of forsaking the Lord.

Obviously, sin is a complex issue.

James says that you sin because you have impure motives and unchecked desires that give birth to sin.

1 John chapter 2 says that you sin because you have fleshly desires, wandering eyes, pride about possessions and greed.

1 John 2 · chapter mention

Judas, who literally betrayed Jesus to death, he did that because he loved money.

He desired money.

Adam and Eve sinned when they desired knowledge.

David sinned when he desired sex, and then again when he desired to cover it up.

Satan sinned when he desired the authority and the power of God.

But underneath every single one of those sins is a rejection of God.

All sin is a violation of God's laws and commandments.

It's a violation of the conscience God gives you to keep you from sin.

Every sin ever committed has this at its core: a forsaking of the Lord.

You can't sin without rejecting God.

Sin in the simplest terms is a rejection of God and his goodness and his character.

Sin is knowing what God commands and refusing to heed it.

It's forsaking God as the Lord of the universe and exalting yourself into his throne instead.

The next time sin confronts you and tempts you, don't ask yourself, do I want to do this sin or not?

That's the nature of temptation.

Of course you want to do it.

Ask yourself, do I want to reject God or not?

Because there is no way around it.

All sin is a rejection of God.

And this is pointed out in the middle of verse 13.

God identifies himself as the fountain of living waters.

What a great expression that is.

It's one of my favorite, it's probably my favorite word picture for God and his character in the Bible.

He's the fountain of living waters.

He's the source of all things.

It's used over and over and over again, this description of God as a fountain in the Old Testament.

Everything that is good and pure and holy comes from Him.

He's the fountain of life.

He's the author of life.

Everything who's alive in the universe has life because it comes from God.

Even Jesus says, I have life because the Father gives it to me.

He's the eternally begotten Son of God.

He's the image of the life-giving Father.

Everything that's love in the universe has love because of it's an overflow of God's character.

Everything that is light, God is a source of light.

You can see goodness, you can experience love.

You can have life because it comes from God.

He is the ever-living, overflowing, benevolent fountain.

That's who's rejected in sin.

Not some arbitrary deity, not some idol on a wall somewhere, not some icon in a room or in a stained glass window or on a dashboard of a car.

That's not who's rejected in sin.

The one rejected in the sin is the eternally benevolent God who just wants to give good things to his people.

Behind this description of God as a fountain of living water, it lets you know the nature of God.

God wants to compart good things with you.

He wants to share salvation with you, love with you, grace with you.

He wants to give himself to you.

He is the fountain of living waters.

That's who's rejected every time you sin.

What young child, incapable of providing for himself, would reject his parents.

I remember when I was six years old, I even ran away once.

My parents did not come looking for me.

And I can understand the idea.

A six-year-old runs away, where's he gonna go?

He'll get hungry, he'll come home.

He needs a bed, he'll come home.

His friend's parents will throw him out of their house, he'll come home.

It's amazing that a six-year-old has more sense than a sinner does.

Who abandons God, searching for pleasure elsewhere.

God's self-description of a fountain should remind you that he gives eternal life.

John chapter 4, that we read as a scripture reading.

John 4 · chapter mention

Whoever drinks of the water I give him will never be thirsty, Jesus says.

It'll be a spring of water welding up to eternal life.

Psalm 63, my soul thirsts for you as a person in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

I mean, that's the nature of God.

He is a fountain and we are desperate for water in a dry and thirsty land, and he provides it.

He gives it to us by satisfying our thirsty souls.

God satisfies the souls of those who search for him.

Psalm 107, verse 9.

Psalms 107:9

He satisfies the longing of the soul, and the hungry soul he fills.

The sentence could end there and it would be an extreme blessing.

He satisfies the hungry soul and the longing soul he fills, but it goes on.

He fills with good things.

With good things.

He's the fountain of living waters.

But rejecting him is only the first of Israel's crimes.

That's only one of their crimes.

They have a second crime that he gets to in verse 13.

The second crime, they hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that cannot even hold any water.

And so we don't have cisterns in our culture, really.

I looked into getting one in our house here in Alexandria, and it was like$5,000, and I stopped thinking about it.

A cistern is not a well.

Some translations even render it as well.

Very different.

A well is a hole dug.

It hits the water table or a water source underground.

It's internally replenished.

You go to it, you lower a bucket, you draw the bucket out.

Communities have wells, neighborhoods have wells.

Very unusual in the ancient Uries for a person to have a well.

Wells were communal.

And if you get water from a well, you have to go to it every single day.

When I was in Rwanda this summer, this is the normal daily activity for families.

In fact, it's a family for the kids.

In much of the world, it's the women that have to go get water.

In Rwanda, it's the kids.

It's the kids' job.

Little kids, juggling, they call them jelly cans.

These big yellows look like 10-gallon gas containers, these big yellow cans, everybody calls them jelly cans, and the kids have to drag them down the street.

Some of them tie them on ropes and drag them to the community well, fill them up, and they all pay their older brother or you know, some bigger college student to tie them to their bicycle and ride them back to their house.

Every day.

It's a big routine.

I got my picture taken of one guy who had like 15 of these things tied to his bicycle.

It was incredible.

That's every day.

You know what's better than a well?

A cistern.

You can have a cistern at your house.

But the hard part about a cistern is it's expensive and it is a lot of work.

You have to make it in a rock, an underground rock.

You have to find a rock big enough for this.

You have to hew it out.

You chisel it out.

You chisel out an opening to contain the water.

You then lower someone down into it who has to put some rudimentary plaster around the inside of it, and then it has to rain to fill the cistern.

If you have one, great.

You don't need to send your kids down to the well every day.

You can have your own water source at your house.

And it's year-round.

As long as it rains enough in the rainy season, you can, and you measure it enough, you can keep water all year.

It's so great if you have a cistern.

So expensive to make, though.

And it does not internally replenish itself.

It requires water from outside.

You know what's better than all of that?

Is a spring at your house.

Natural water bubbling up from the grounds.

A fountain of living water in your front yard would be incredible.

That's the water supply.

Here's what the Israelites had: they had a fountain of living water.

A fountain that they could turn on and off.

It just bubbled and they drank and they would never thirst again.

And they brought in the backhoe and they dug it up and threw it away.

And replaced it with a cistern.

Very time consuming to make, very expensive.

And this cistern, it says in verse 13, is broken.

It can't even hold water.

What good is a broken cistern?

Water gets into it, and the ground can absorb an infinite amount of water.

It's gone.

That's what they did.

They rejected God and replaced him with a broken cistern that can't even hold any water.

Later on in Jeremiah, I think it's Jeremiah 38.

Remember, they get so sick of Jeremiah's ministry, they decide to kill him by throwing him into a cistern.

Only because of the drought, because they're worshiping the rain God, they have a drought.

The cistern has no water in it.

He just lands on the muddy ground.

The problem with the cistern is if you're in a drought, it does you no good because it doesn't have its own water.

It doesn't have a water source.

That's the folly.

You reject the fountain of living water and replace it with a cistern that can't even hold any water.

It wouldn't even be good for sewage.

If you put sewage in it, that would seep into the ground.

The people rejected God for broken cisterns.

This is not a mistake of ignorance.

It's an intentional mistake.

It's a sizing up God and saying, I would rather die of thirst than drink from you.

I would rather die here than have to repent from my sin and turn to you.

This is not an act of laziness.

It's an act of hatred towards God.

It's not that it's easier to drink from a cistern.

Appreciate that.

It's not easier to drink from a cistern.

It's much harder.

And much worse.

The only explanation is a hatred towards God.

You know, I can't think of a single place in the Old Testament the Israelites ever even bother to justify their sin.

They never give a defense of themselves to God and say, Well, God, you deserve our sin.

This is why we're rejecting you.

No.

They don't even dignify it with a response.

They just reject the fountain and replace with a broken cistern.

This is the nature of every sin.

Do you understand this?

Every sin has behind it this desire to satisfy yourself from something that does not satisfy.

The person who gives his life into sin is living in a wasteland with no hope, no peace, no security, no comfort, and no salvation.

The believer that keeps falling into sin is it's spiritual suicide.

You're rejecting the fountain of waters that gives you life and you're replacing it for something that just harms your life.

That's the nature of all sin.

You think of the drug addict who keeps doing drugs, keeps doing them.

And they're eroding his life, they're destroying his life.

Why is he doing it?

It's a quest for satisfaction that will end in suicide.

It's a quest for satisfaction that will end up with him dead on the side of the road.

That's how that story goes.

And yet he's determined.

He's determined.

He thinks he needs it so much.

Or you think of a I achieve drugs because it's a very obvious example, but this works for anything.

Think of a person who gives himself over to worry.

It just eats at his soul, it eats at her soul.

It corrodes them from the inside.

It destroys, it has a destructive, corrosive effect on their life.

But they won't stop worrying.

They won't stop being anxious.

There's a sense in which they they need that feeling of control.

Think of the husband who is just passive.

He knows what God has called him to do, but he won't.

It ends up destroying, corroding his marriage.

But he won't be a leader.

You think of the wife who is domineering.

She knows it's sin, but she feels like she needs to.

Think of the person who looks at things online that they shouldn't.

It corrodes the mind.

It destroys the marriage.

It ends up wrecking your life.

You don't think it will.

In fact, you think that it will satisfy you, don't you?

It'll bring you some measure of satisfaction.

You actually want to.

Does it?

No.

But you keep going back.

Maybe this time it will bring you satisfaction.

No, it's only destruction.

Only destruction.

I want you to think of this not from the perspective of the Israelites, not from the perspective of your drug-using neighbors.

I want you to think of this from the perspective of you.

This is your sin I'm talking about.

It is your sin that has rejected God, your sin that is looking for satisfaction in some other place.

It should remind you, of course, of C.S.

Lewis's analogy in his story, The Weight of Glory, about the parents that come home to fetch their child to take him on a holiday at sea, an ocean cruise.

And if you're familiar with the weight of glory, you know the illustration.

The boy is playing in mud in the side of his house, in the side yard.

He's playing in mud, and his parents say, Let's go on a holiday at sea.

And he says, No, I'm having fun in the mud.

And Lewis asks, I mean, how do you reason with a kid like that?

What do you tell him?

Pack your bags, we're going obey now.

But the problem is the kid just doesn't conceive of what a holiday at sea is like.

He doesn't have a grid for it.

He doesn't know what it's like.

He's having fun in the mud, thank you very much.

I think of that sometimes.

My wife makes just an incredibly delicious and difficult meal.

It's cost, you know, 80 bucks in a restaurant.

And I think of a kid that looks at it and says, We haven't had this before.

I don't like it.

Where's Wendy's chicken nuggets?

The kid who's playing in the mud in the side of the house, what's his problem?

That he wants to have fun?

That's not the problem, Lewis says.

The problem is that he's too easily satisfied.

That is your problem with sin.

You think it will satisfy, it doesn't.

You need to view sin as a broken cistern that cannot hold any water at all.

It just takes whatever joy you have out.

God delights in satisfying the souls of people who come to him because it magnifies his glory.

When a person realizes that God alone can be the fountain of living water, God alone can bring satisfaction that sin can't, then they rejoice in the Lord.

The great irony of the Bible is that God satisfies the thirsty person's soul by dying himself.

That Jesus comes to earth, takes our sins in his body, and dies a death in our place.

That's how this story ends.

And when you stop seeking satisfaction in sin and instead turn for salvation to Christ, your soul is satisfied through his death and resurrection.

One of my favorite hymns.

Remember the next line?

Drawn from Emmanuel's veins.

See the twist on this illustration.

There's a fountain.

Jesus is a fountain.

Only this fountain is filled with living water, but it is also filled with blood.

The blood is drawn from his veins.

It is his own life that he gives for us.

Sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

It's fitting that God is a fountain and he's given us the cup of communion to remember him by.

The fountain produces the water, the water of life.

The fountain produces blood, the blood that leads to eternal life.

Lord, we're thankful for salvation that comes to us through Christ, to the forgiveness of sins.

We confess that we are too often too easily satisfied.

Open our eyes to the reality of sin.

Open our eyes to the joy that is in Christ.

We remember the woman at the well.

We receive Jesus' words to her as if they are to us.

We come to you for living water.

We give you thanks in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanual Bible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel vocally.